Tuesday, 5 April 2011

The Doctor Who panel at San Francisco's WonderCon kicked off to much fanfare (and free t-shirts) Sunday morning, the crowd cheering in excitement about the upcoming season of the BBC mainstay. After reshowing the totally badass trailer that debuted late last week, moderator Chris Hardwick introduced the panel: director Toby Haynes, actor Mark Shepard, and writer Neil Gaiman

The panel introduced a two minute behind-the-scenes segment that showed some of the footage for the coming episodes set in America, featuring a John Wayne-like Doctor. "I wear Stetsons now. Stetsons are cool." The footage looked great, and it was combined with the usual "biggest threat ever faced" claims. However, if there is one thing that Doctor Who has always delivered on, it's the promises of getting bigger and better. Haynes said they had big plans for The Doctor in the US, and that it would be a two-part episode. Though they only actually shot in the Utah desert, The Doctor (Matt Smith), Amy (Karen Gillan), and Rory (Arthur Darvill) will be traversing America from New York to Chicago and beyond.Judging from what we've seen in the teaser and the various clips shown at the panel, Sheppard's character -- Canton Everett Delaware III -- plays a key role in the episodes based in America. They showed a great scene between the always monstrous President Nixon (Stuart Milligan) and Delaware, who seems to be a retired Federal Agent picked by the President to carry out an insidious mission. "You were my second choice for this, Mr. Delaware." Nixon tells him. "That's okay. You were my second choice for President, Mr. Nixon." So good!

The panel went on to talk about how they each got involved and all of the answers were the same: they were fans since childhood and when they were asked to do the show, it was a no-brainer to say yes. Gaiman talked a little bit about the episode he wrote, called "The Doctor's Wife," which was actually meant to be shown last season (instead of "The Lodger") but was cut due to budget constraints. Gaiman said that it's the fourth episode of season 6, and it sheds some light on the long gestating relationship between The Doctor and River Song. He said he was happy to move the episode, as he got to rewrite some scenes between Amy and Rory (Rory was "dead" at the time the episode would have originally aired), and cited why the chemistry of the characters works so well. He also teased that there may be an appearance by an "old acquaintance with a new face."

One of the most intriguing moments of the Season 6 preview stemmed from a fan's question. The fan asked why we see David Tennant's (the previous and 10th Doctor) TARDIS in the trailer for the upcoming episodes. The panel reacted with a very telling "no comment." Haynes assured the fan that he didn't direct that episode, so he honestly had no idea. Could there perhaps be a correlation between the 10th Doctor and the "old acquaintance" that Gaiman had mentioned? Unlikely, but it's a juicy tidbit all the same.

Saturday, 25 September 2010

Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat has revealed more details of the cliffhanger ending to the first half of the next series.

It was previously announced that the show's sixth run will be split in half, starting in spring 2011 and returning in the autumn.

"There will be a huge cliffhanger... that we wouldn't normally do at the end of a series of Doctor Who because it would be too long before it came back," Moffat told Doctor Who Magazine. "[It is] an enormous, game-changing cliffhanger for the Doctor, Amy and Rory. It will change everything for them."

He teased: "You will see the Doctor's life change forever, you will gasp in astonishment at the true nature of his relationship with Amy and you will cry out in horror as Rory Williams stumbles to the brink of a tragic mistake."

Saturday, 22 May 2010

Developed in association with Doctor Who’s Executive Producer and show runner, Steven Moffat, Doctor Who Live promises the same excitement, adventure and suspense that viewers have come to expect from the TV programme and will feature specially filmed new video scenes.

Opening in wartime London and concluding in an epic onstage battle, audiences should expect the unexpected as the The Doctor’s arch-enemies the Daleks are joined by some of the best-loved and most terrifying monsters from the TV series including the Cybermen, Weeping Angels, Judoon and Oods to name but a few.

With an out-of-this-world set, Doctor Who Live will feature special FX, optical illusions and spectacular pyrotechnics building to an epic finale. Specially edited video clips, drawn from the TV Programme will be shown on a massive screen and accompanied by the music of longtime Doctor Who composer Murray Gold. These iconic scores will be brought to life by a 16 piece orchestra live on stage.

Saturday, 26 December 2009

Part 1

The Doctor arrives on the Ood Sphere on Christmas Eve and sees that the Ood have progressed further technologically than they should have. Ood Sigma takes the Doctor to the Ood Elders who show him visions of the Master returning. He sees an old woman taking the Master's ring and he realizes that the essence of the Master survived his non-regeneration during their last encounter. The Doctor rushes to Earth in the TARDIS to try and stop his arch-enemy.

Since her last appearance, Lucy Saxon has been imprisoned. One of the warders is Miss Trefusis, the woman who retrieved the Master's ring. On Christmas Eve night, the prison governor brings Lucy to a chamber where it is revealed that most of the staff are fanatics of the Master who have been working ever since his apparent death to bring about his resurrection. With the help of the ring and a biometric imprint taken from Lucy, the Master reappears in a swirl of energy, but Lucy and some other warders have prepared for this eventuality and Lucy hurls a harmful potion at the Master. The Doctor arrives to find the prison obliterated by the resulting explosion.

The Master survives the blast, but his life force is left in a state of constant depletion, forcing him to drain the vitality of a number of homeless people on a desolate construction site. Like the Ood and many others on Earth, Wilfred Mott has experienced faded visions of the Master, and has been scouring London with other pensioners, under the group name the "Silver Cloak", to track down the Doctor. Wilf and the Doctor re-unite and the Doctor reveals that a prophecy has been made predicting his death. Later encountering the Master, the Doctor discovers that the drumming in his head is not a symptom of insanity, but perfectly real. A squad of troops suddenly appear, sedating and kidnapping the Master and taking him to the mansion of billionaire Joshua Naismith.

Naismith and his daughter, Abigail, are in possession of the "Immortality Gate", which has restorative powers enabling the healing of injuries and, as Naismith hopes, the resurrection of the dead. Wanting to secure immortality for Abigail, Naismith enlists the assistance of the Master to mend the malfunctioning Gate. Infiltrating the Naismith estate, the Doctor and Wilf discover that two of Naismith's staff are undercover Vinvocci, members of the race which originally owned the Gate, and that its healing abilities can extend to the whole population of any given species across a whole planet. She and her partner are pressured into explaining the Immortality Gate is a device that heals lifeforms across entire planets. The doctor realizes the Master is going to do something to the Human race and goes to stop him. He gets to the immortality gate but is captured.

After the Master breaks through his straight jacket and flies into the gateway then because he has set the gateway to human and he is in the the machine every human on earth then becomes copies of the master with the exception of Wilfred who is shielded in the control room and Donna, who due to the events in Journey's End is half human - half Timelord. However as Donna witnesses her mother and her fiancée turn into clones of the Master she starts to remember everything that was erased from her memory.

As the Master steps out of the gateway he tells the doctor that he has turned the humans into the "Master Race" as he looks round and everyone is the Master. As the Doctor looks round and every Master is laughing at him. As the camera fades to black, the Narrator claims the Master and his removal of humanity is only a small part of an approaching conflict. The Narrator then appears on-screen and it is revealed that he is a Time Lord by way of his robes, and is shown to addressing a large hall of fellow Time Lords and Time Ladies. The Time Lord proclaims that Gallifrey is restored, that the Time Lords have returned, and that this heralds the end of time itself.

The End of Time Part 2 synopsis

The Doctor faces the end of his life as the Master's plans hurtle out of control. With the sound of drums growing louder, and an ancient trap closing around the Earth, the Doctor and Wilf must fight alone. But sacrifices must be made, and the deadly prophecy warns: "He will knock four times."

Saturday, 17 October 2009

Well where to start.........the new series of SJA has started, and the first episode was great!!!!Doctor Who will be getting a new logo in 2010 which you can see here:We also have an interview about Waters on Mars from SFXJust how scary is The Waters of Mars?“I’m not sure if it’s as scary as Blink, but it’s quite frightening – because it’s so real, I think. I hope so!”

How on Earth do you go about making water scary? And what were the challenges of shooting with that volume of water?"I hope you think it is [scary] when you see it! It was very, very difficult. We had a difficult time trying to work out how to do the water… can you imagine, the volumes of water that we required, in a studio setting? How d’you get rid of it? If you want to do retakes, how do you get everything dry again?

“The kind of water effect we wanted was sort-of mystical, almost organic – well, it is organic, obviously! – so the difficulty was deciding with the visual FX guys which one out of the effect they were offering us was the right one. They came up with five or six different kinds of pipes, hoses and systems. And eventually there was one that we all said, ‘That’s the one.’ There was a uniform yes to one particular effect, and that was the one we used.

“Now, how do you make it creepy? It seems to be alive, the water, by the way it follows the characters in the story. Sort of – we didn’t make a big thing of it in the story, but that’s how I shot it, so it was chasing people, following them and trapping them. The best effects you can get come out of seeing the enormity of the water, the relentlessness of it. I think where it becomes really creepy and you get the fear, is when it continues draining out of characters’ mouths.

“There was a very complex system of tubes and piping that they all had to wear within the prosthetics – and water was squeezed and pressurized through the tubes to give the volume of water we required to come out of the actors’ mouths on a continuous basis.”

“Waters” is going out in November, when the evenings are darker than during the regular series run. Did you have that in the back of your mind when you were deciding on the tone of the show?“When I first read the script, it was originally going to be put out on Christmas Day, I think! I was quite worried that this dark, deep story, which is… well, I don’t know that it’s part of a trilogy, but it certainly will lead you into the finalé. You know something horrible’s going to happen after this story, involving the Doctor – but you don’t know what. I thought it was very dark – I mean, really dark, for Christmas. That’s not the reason they changed their minds to put it out in November – I think that was the controller of BBC One, deciding that maybe as we had three more to go, then one could be in the latter part of the year so that there wasn’t such a long gap between when the first special went out and Christmas. But when I knew it was going to go out earlier in the year, I was able to think about it in a much more dark way, rather than trying to keep the Christmas spirit!”

There seem to be some elements of foreshadowing in “Waters” – the stuff about the “four knocks”.“I have to tell you, I haven’t seen, I haven’t read – in fact, I probably wasn’t allowed – to know how the next episodes, the final two-parter for David, starts and ends. I’ve no idea what it’s about! It’s going to end, obviously, with him regenerating into Matt Smith – but I’ve no idea what happens in it! So I don’t know to what extent the horror is in that two-parter. I knew about and read the previous script, I knew about the four knocks thing, so I understood what was going on, and what had been and what’s coming, and so on – in terms of the, “when four knocks happen, you know he’s going to die,” kind of thing. So I played on that, but I didn’t know quite what that meant and how it was going to happen in the last two episodes – and I still don’t!”

And the Doctor’s scared himself in this episode, which is a pretty unusual situation…“Yes, but I think – with some exceptions, obviously – most fans of Doctor Who will know and feel sad and be hurt and worried and concerned – and wonder, is this the Doctor we’ve always known and loved, this ancient mariner traveling through the universe and helping people to help themselves, and being good and worthy and whatever, and showing them the way. And here he’s terrified. But I think that’s good, and I think most people will be interested to see how he gets out of this one. That what I think they think every time. But here, he really is in a very fearful state – and doesn’t want to die, obviously. I don’t think he wants to regenerate – I think he feels he’s got more to do, so how that gets resolved… well, I’m going to watch as well.”